reporting – BlackBerry Developer Bloghttp://devblog.blackberry.com
Fri, 09 Dec 2016 17:20:12 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/9ef0a66c09615fa946c4179662398878?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngreporting – BlackBerry Developer Bloghttp://devblog.blackberry.com
It’s all about the data (and reporting) – an interview with Distimohttp://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/02/distimo-interview/
http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/02/distimo-interview/#respondWed, 08 Feb 2012 16:15:34 +0000http://devblog.blackberry.com/?p=8411]]>I’m here at BlackBerry DevCon Europe with with Remco van den Elzen from Distimo. BlackBerry® developers around the world know that name – it’s one of the best app store reporting services available. Remco, you were mentioning before that there are a lot of BlackBerry developers using Distimo now – every three in the top three hundred use your service. For those who don’t know, what do you offer developers?

We have a free analytics tool available to developers for BlackBerry App World™ and across all major app stores. We enable them to track applications across all those stores, but also in terms of advertising networks. So we allow them to track their own applications, to look at their rankings and see how they’re doing in each country and each store, and also look at what they’re making from each purchase and from advertising revenue.

You break it down into categories too, to see how they’re doing in each category?

Yes – so for example, they can look at the Business category or the top level of the Games category, so they can compare themselves against competitors. It makes it very relevant for them to see how they’re doing in each market.

Your service also supports Apple App Store, Google Android Market and other storefronts. For developers who build for multiple platforms, are they able to compare their data from across different storefronts if they’re selling or offering their app in those?

Yes. That’s also the added value – so they can have one chart, for example, stacking up revenue from Apple, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Nokia. So, all the major stores we do support, and they can even integrate the ad revenue, so they can instantly see what kind of business models are working best for them.

Whether it’s a freemium or a one-time purchase or if ad-supported really is the best model – they can track it over all the different storefronts and see.

Yeah, and we see a lot of revenue coming from after users downloaded the applications. It used to be that the paid application was very popular, but right now a lot of revenue is being made from in-app purchase or advertising, so they can really see how the model is evolving for them. They can even benchmark it against the market, so they can see what proportion of revenue is generated by in-app services, what kind of ad revenue they’re making, and compare that against the market.

So when you’re looking at all the data – and you obviously have a ton of data here at your disposal – do you internally then look at that and do…is it monthly and quarterly reports?

Yes, and developers may also know our name because we publish a lot of reports about the aggregated data we collect. So we collect a lot of data from a lot of developers, and we aggregate that data and we provide reports for free on our website that give general insight into how the market is evolving. We also have paid reports that are available to other companies – mainly device manufacturers, operators and larger developers – the ones who are interested in a variety of metrics. For example, they’d like to know which apps are successful, or how large is Apple versus Google in a certain market.

The service today – it’s free to sign up for and connect to any of the stores?

Yeah, it’s very simple – just go to the website, sign up and allow us access to your reporting. We don’t need to insert any code into your application, you’ll be set up in a few minutes and you can get charting away.

What other services are you looking at now with all that data? Are there more things you’re looking at offering? I know you mentioned ads – that’s available today?

That’s available today. You can add four different ad networks right now, and we’re looking to add a few more.

What are the ad networks now?

iAd, Adfonic, AdMob, and InMobi.

When you’re looking at storefronts now, what trends do you see? We talk about advertising and in-app purchasing and freemium models, but what trends interest you? What do you like looking at when you’re looking at reports?

What’s very interesting in the east – for example, China – is that it’s gaining a lot of momentum in a lot of stores in terms of the development that’s being made. That’s a market that’s really exploding right now. What you mentioned about in-app purchases – that’s very relevant, and also looking at types of content that are popular in different storefronts. Games are typically very popular, but it differs by device and by storefront. Those trends are very interesting to look at.

Alright, so, this may be a loaded question – on BlackBerry smartphones or BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets, what’s your favorite app?

For the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, I think the games are very nice, beautiful games – the racing games, I really like, and of course I always like the Cut The Rope. But the racing games on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet are very nice to play with.

Alright, so thank you very much, and we really appreciate you coming out to BlackBerry DevCon Europe.

BlackBerry devs – please welcome Brent for a special guest post about BlackBerry® Analytics Service 1.0, just released today! Let him know if you have any questions in the comments. – Ed.

Today we’re announcing the release of BlackBerry Analytics Service 1.0, powered by webtrends™. This service is available to any developer of Java®-based apps for BlackBerry® smartphones at no charge for up to 25,000,000 server calls per month. BlackBerry Analytics enables you to collect and analyze data on how your apps are being used. Reports that are generated can provide insight that can be used to understand how users are engaging your app, enhance user experience in order to drive more downloads, learn how to market your app more effectively, and be better able to detect issues as they arise rather than waiting for feedback.

Insightful Reports

BlackBerry Analytics Service 1.0 provides more than 20 interactive reports that can supply useful insights about how your app is being used. I don’t have the space to review all of the reports, but I’ll provide a couple of examples to provide a taste of the available reports and how they can be used.

The screenshot at the top of the blog post shows the Key Metrics report. In this case, we can see that the sample apps average number of users has been progressively growing for the past few weeks. So if the app developer monitors this report, they could track the positive response to the launch of a new version of their app and evaluate the success of marketing activities on specific days. They could also see if their app is used by more people during weekdays than weekends, perhaps suggesting that the app is helpful for some work-related activities.

The Events report shown below could give that same developer some clues on which app features are more popular with their users. This report shows the relative frequency of various events – basically meaning the usage of a particular feature. In this sample app, we see that searching by Category is much more popular than searching by SearchBar. Based on this insight, the developer could work to further improve their Category search functionality and release a new version of their app that would be even more appealing to their users.

Easy to Integrate

You may be wondering how much effort it takes to get these reports. Well, we’ve made every effort to keep things easy to use. It’s a simple matter of registering for the service and downloading the SDK*. The Analytics Service also requires BlackBerry® Device Software v4.5 or higher. Then, after adding the library to your app and writing a few lines of code to initialize the BlackBerry Analytics Service, each specific user action of interest can be captured by writing just one line of code.